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Faust [OP]

2003-03-02 02:44 | User Profile

Dershowitz Letter 2 11-May-1999 Ethnic cleansing — what's the big deal?

"Making Arab families move — intact — from one Arab village or town to another may constitute a human rights violation. But in the whole spectrum of human rights issues — especially taking into account the events in Europe during the 1940's — it is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many aspects to some massive urban renewal or other projects that require large-scale movement of people." — Alan Dershowitz May 11, 1999

Alan M. Dershowitz Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law 520 Hauser Hall Harvard Law School 1575 Massachusetts Avenue Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

Alan Dershowitz: Did your really say this? The following statement has been attributed to your book, Chutzpah:

As a civil libertarian and human rights activist, I was never much moved by the claims of these refugees. Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary. Making Arab families move — intact — from one Arab village or town to another may constitute a human rights violation. But in the whole spectrum of human rights issues — especially taking into account the events in Europe during the 1940's — it is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many aspects to some massive urban renewal or other projects that require large-scale movement of people. For example, the building of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt necessitated the relocation of 100,000 Arabs and the destruction of numerous Arab villages. There were certainly numerous precedents following both world wars, as well as other dislocating events of history — including the establishment of new states. There were so many refugee groups throughout the postwar world, and in so much worse condition, that it is difficult to understand why this particular dislocation assumed such international proportions.

For example, following the end of World War II, approximately fifteen million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from their homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other Central and Eastern European areas where their families had lived for centuries. Two million died during this forced expulsion. Czechoslovakia alone expelled nearly three million Sudeten Germans, turning them into displaced persons. The United States, Britain, and the international community in general approved these expulsions, as necessary to secure a more lasting peace. [...] President Franklin Roosevelt's assistant Harry Hopkins memorialized his boss's view that although transfer of ethnic Germans "is a hard procedure, it is the only way to maintain peace." Excerpted from: [url=http://www.carasso.com/roger/dershowitz.html]http://www.carasso.com/roger/dershowitz.html[/url]

If you did say it, then questions arise. If the above is indeed something that you have said, then certain reflections spring to mind that I would like to hear your thoughts on.

Doesn't your thinking resemble Slobodan Milosevic's? For example, it might appear that consistency requires you to view the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Kosovo as a "fifth-rate issue" of the sort that might arise in the course of any large urban renewal project or in the building of any large dam. This might strike not a few observers as a breathtakingly original view of the Kosovo crisis, and might lead them to ask whether you had been much in demand as a guest speaker among Serbian expatriates in North America, or on Serbian television, perhaps appearing together with Slobodan Milosevic to explain to the world why "the only way to maintain peace" was this simple solution of relocating the Kosovars. One could add to such a defense of Milosevic's ethnic cleansing that as many of the cleansed Kosovars will end up as permanent residents of such countries as Canada, the United States, and Germany, their standard of living will be enhanced by the relocation, which together with their pride in having helped "maintain peace" by moving, should more than compensate them for any temporary inconvenience that they may have experienced. One could add finally that as Israel remained in high esteem following its relocation of Palestinians, there might be little to prevent Milosevic's Yugoslavia from remaining in comparably high esteem following its similar relocation of Kosovars.

Doesn't your thinking resemble Hitler's? And of course your advocating tolerance toward relocation invites us to examine under a fresh light Hitler's initial policy of relocating Jews out of Germany, a policy heretofore viewed unsympathetically by so many who had not access to your blanket defense that such relocations fall in line with "numerous precedents" and are "the only way to maintain peace."

Does relocating intact families to new villages constitute a kinder, gentler variety of ethnic cleansing? It is highly relevant to judging the culpability of Israeli ethnic cleansing that, as you point out, the Isrealis went out of their way to keep Arab families "intact", and that the Israeli ethnic cleansing relocated the intact families merely "from one Arab village or town to another." These pieces of information do help to explain how even a human rights activist like yourself can come to feel that the complaints of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians amount to no more than a "fifth-rate issue." I suppose that in your estimation Israelis murdering entire Palestinian families would constitute cases of keeping Arab families "intact," and that the number of families in which only some members were murdered is too small to invalidate the generalization that families were kept "intact"? And I suppose too that you have been convinced by evidence which you could have cited but did not that an empty house equivalent to the one abandoned awaited each relocating intact family, and employment equivalent to the employment abandoned was also at hand, and similar arable land, and comparable access to water, and empty schools waiting to be filled with the laughing relocated children, and mosques in the new location that otherwise would have been under-utilized, but which with the influx of the relocated intact families began to resound with the sounds of worship?

Will you apply your thinking consistently to future events? I imagine too that if the day should ever come when six million Israelis find the hostility of their environment grown so intense that they decide to evacuate the Middle East, you will view this too as akin to an urban renewal project — though a minor one in comparison to say the fifteen-million-ethnic-Germans renewal project you mention above — and that you will at that time justify the evacuation of Israel as simply following "numerous precedents" and as being "the only way to maintain peace"?

Doesn't your thinking lack originality? Your quite remarkable contribution to thinking on such issues seems to lie in your conclusion that peace is so precious a commodity, that to attain it, the ethnic cleansing of millions, and perhaps even tens of millions, of people is not too high a price to pay. Quite a remarkable contribution, truly, and yet not wholly original, as many thinkers of the stature of, say, Attila or of Stalin or of Pol Pot have reasoned their way to a similar conclusion, and have been translating that conclusion into practice from earliest times right up to the present day.

What kind of peace do you see ethnic cleansing bringing? A final question that I would like to leave you with has to do with the nature of the "peace" which you say has been won by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israelis. Specifically, can you think of any other nation which, taking its size into consideration, has incited such a vast number of people throughout the world to dedicate themselves to its destruction? I invite you to review a number of countries which are comparable to Israel in that they are small, are democratic, allow a free press, and enjoy a high standard of living — countries like Belgium or Denmark or Switzerland. Would you say that Israel has won a peace and a stability and a security comparable to theirs? Would you say that the number of people dedicated to the destruction of Israel is not appreciably greater than the number of people dedicated to the destruction of Belgium or Denmark or Switzerland? If your answer is that the peace enjoyed by Israel does indeed appear to be markedly inferior to the peace enjoyed by Belgium or Denmark or Switzerland, then I would invite you to reconsider the appropriateness of your comparing Israeli ethnic cleansing to a massive urban renewal project or to the building of a large dam, as urban renewal and dam building — for reasons that you may want to begin thinking about — typically do not incite any widespread dedication to a recompensatory destruction.

Lubomyr Prytulak

url: [url=http://www.ukar.org/dersho03.shtml]http://www.ukar.org/dersho03.shtml[/url]

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School professor

[url=http://www.ukar.org/dersho.shtml]http://www.ukar.org/dersho.shtml[/url]

il ragno

2003-03-02 04:11 | User Profile

When Dershowitz attacks, he uses morality like a bloodstained cudgel.

When he's forced to defend his own attacks - when he's indicted with his own words - he trades the heavy club for the well-hidden, poison-tipped punji sticks of legal technicality, and enrages you into walking into them.

Below is a pungent review of the cited book, Chutzpah. As vile as this book seems to be, it pales compared to the horrific, stomach-turning Dersh novel JUST REVENGE, a literary trash heap - dishonest in every way save for its depiction of Jewish self-righteousness in the commission of any atrocity, large or small.

[url=http://www.vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/12/1/Cobden109-114.html]http://www.vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/12/1/Co...den109-114.html[/url]

[u]REVIEWS[/u] CHUTZPAH by Alan M. Dershowitz. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. Clothbound, 378 pages, $22.95, ISBN 0-316-18137-4.

Reviewed by John Cobden

"I admit that my wife is outspoken, " the genial Jewish" comedian Sam Levenson used to say, "but by whom?" Levenson no doubt was unacquainted with Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard University law professor, columnist and man-about-politics. He has definitely never been at a loss for words, on every conceivable subject. Yet, as we see from the title and the numerous other words from Yiddish and Hebrew with which the book bristles many of them shockingly "insensitive" to non-Jews this one is not going to be a very congenial read.

Chutzpah, according to Leo Rosten's Joy's of Yiddish (1968), is from Hebrew and means insolence, audacity, gall, effrontery: " A Chutzpahnik may be defined as the man who shouts 'Help!' 'Help!' while beating you up." As we'll see, that may not be too wide off the mark as to what Dershowitz and company are up to. Example: the author's immediate and insistent use of the insulting epithet goy, which is roughly on a par with certain now-banned English slang for other races.

As Boston uneasily observes, "some Jews use goy in a perjorative sense," which seems to fit most of Dershowitz's applications; so his decision to descend into this sort of calculatedly abrasive vocabulary certainly sets a bizarre tone for one trumpeted as a great civil libertarian who is demanding more sensitivity toward Jewish and "minority" concerns. Moreover, it seems an oddly Orwellian doublespeak from the principal architect of the sinister and one-sided "anti-hate" (or better, anti-White) laws now being hammered into place across the country.

Why this book, now? Unless one naively accepts that books are unalloyed pearls of wisdom dropped into our laps by a benign Providence, skepticism about the real motives for their writing and publishing is always in order. Dershowitz makes pompous allusions to the Jewish "literary and oral tradition that goes back thousands of years," to "documenting my journey as a Jew," and the like, but he probably has more mundane fish to fry.

Readers of Dershowitz's newspaper column will recognize much recycled material, cobbled together in a sometimes rambling and always topical style that probably will not have an extended "shelf life." Aside from their long-term saleability, however, several of Dershowitz's themes are of current import and show us what he and other chutpahniks are reallyconcerned with: "anti-Semitism," Holocaust Revisionism, and the rise of populist political rebels, such as Pat Buchanan and David Duke, who are less than reverential to the primacy of Jewish and Israeli concerns in modern America.

On the whole, Chutzpah will be a familiar litanyto connoisseurs of dual-loyalist special pleading. Certain key terms are hammered insistently, with the first "Holocaust" in the second paragraph and the first "anti-Semitism" in the sixth. From there on, the cumulative effect of these dismal epithets begins almost to resemble the chanting of Oriental mantras, or the chattering of commercial trademarked jargon in advertising jungles. Such heavily loaded proprietary terms and others, such as "bigotry," "prejudice," and "hatred," are worked into the context of every subject subsequently discussed. I am not convinced that even so alert a writer as Dershowtiz is entirely aware of how compulsively he belabors this woeful cant, and of what impression the average intelligent reader must take away.

Dershowitz offers some of his deepest ruminating on what he calls his "Holocaust mentality":

. . . The Holocaust remainsthe most formative event in my experience. I cannot escape - nor do I try - its continuing influences on my life . . . The Holocaust changed the nature of Judaism and of Jews forever . . . It changed the way every compassionate person views justice and injustice. It should challenge the faith of every thinking being . . . [It] makes it possible to contemplate, without welcoming, the destruction of the human species . . .

With that turgid commitment to the legend, it is not surprising that he lashed out in acrimony at the proliferating international scholarship suggesting that attempted extermination of Jewry ever happened.

Dershowitz deplores the lack of an adequate "Jewish revenge movement" after the war, maintaining that the Nuremberg trials did not prosecute significant numbers, and seemingly oblivious to the historically unprecedented spectacle of the "Nazi war crimes" trials that continue to wear ona half-century after the war. Such an extreme notion of "Jewish revenge" leads him, perhaps inevitably to the ultimate in venom: leading his endorsement implicitly, to the genocidal Morganthau Plan for the impoverishment and deindustrialization of Germany as what should have been done: "They should have suffered - as a people - after the Holocaust."

So much for the objectivity credentials of an American intellectual icon who feels compelled, apparently for the first time in a major establishment-produced book, to attempt a refutation of some themes of "Holocaust" Revisionism.We may be quite certain that such a clear departure from the previous "silent treatment" in major media indicates growing alarm and intent to quench a persistent brush-fire before it gets any larger.

If that is the plan, however, it will have to be far better addressed than it is. Either from his own obvious unfamiliarity with the subject and evident reliance on often outdated file material supplied from elsewhere, or from his inability to quickly dispose of truly important issues with the ad hominem insults and quick snippets of causitry that he favors, Dershowitz's foray into anti-Revisionism is decidedly inadequate.

A case in point is his handling of a "Holocaust" dubiety by columnist Patrick Buchanan. While pondering the likelihood of the Treblinka camp's supposed diesel-powered gas chambers, Buchanan had noted a 1988 incident in which 97 children who were trapped deep underground in a Washington, D.C., tunnel while two locomotives billowed exhaust fumes into the car emerged unscathed after 45 minutes.

Dershowitz tilts at this modest item of Revisionism by quipping that he had "challenged Buchanan to test his hypothesis by locking himself in an airtight chamber in which diesel exhaust is pumped," and by echoing a Jewish writer in the New Republic magazine who opined that "much of the material on which Buchanan bases his columns (about the Holocaust) is sent to him by pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic cranks." Clearly, this is not major-league historical analysis, whatever Dershowtiz's academic affiliations. He will have to do better, or deal with other subjects, to avoid further embarrassing that portion of the Holocaust lobby that pretends to an objective historical method.

His discussion of the deplorable John Demjanjuk case, in which the Ukrainian-born, retired Ohio auto worker was deported to Israel and sentenced to hang as no less than "Ivan the Terrible, Butcher of Treblinka," shows the "flip-side" of the Dershowitz mentality: Israel, right or wrong.

Dershowitz won his spurs as a hair-trigger civil libertarian and defender of the underdog (plus a few over-dogs, like Claus von Bülow and hotel "queen" Leona Helmsley) whose ability to pounce upon and impeach trial evidence of the slightest doubtfulness is legendary. Yet in Chutzpah he vigorously defends every aspect of the Israeli proceeding, including the reliability of eyewitness testimony 40 and 50 years after the fact and the controversial SS identification card that supposedly placed Demjanjuk at a training site for "death camp" guards. Although the card had been supplied to the Israelis by the Soviet secret police and was denounced as a forgery by Demjanjuk's lawyers, for Dershowitz there is no problem: Guilty as charged. Nor, as we know, is Dershowtiz perturbed by the fact that nowhere on the card does there appear a reference to a stationing at Treblinka: he has mused, in one of his newspaper columns, that perhaps Demjanjuk's "killing fields," were not at Treblinka after all!

Elswhere in the book, Dershowtiz jokes about the KGB's skill at retouching photos and fabricating documents when persecuting Russian Jews as spies, but then quickly adds that "skepticism about one source of evidence does not translate into criticism of the noble enterprise of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice." However, a new wrinkle emerged in August 1991, when Demjanjuk's lawyers secured "surprise evidence" from Soviet archives indicating that the so-called "Ivan" was actually a man named Ivan Marczenko. The Israelis may well feel themselves forced to reopen the case. If so, one wonders whether Dershowitz will be critical of the new evidence, or whether he will acknowledge his, OSI's, and Israel's mistakes in justly evaluating the Soviet and survivor evidence.

Dershowtiz purveys his own extreme take on the interests of the "organized Jewish community," as he calls it:

(Remember, the title is Chutzpah! )

Without a doubt, however, his ruling obsessions - "the Holocaust," Israel, and the ever-menacing specter of "anti-Semitism" - are overriding. He picks a fight, for instance, with a Jew who is unwilling to claim a "special indulgence" for his people stemming from their sufferings at Auschwitz. Not surprisingly, Dershowtiz's notion is that "The world owes Jews, and the Jewish state, which was built on the ashes of Auschwitz, a special understanding . . . The Holocaust persuaded the world - Jews as well as non-Jews - of the necessity for a Jewish state." Given these assumptions, it is easier to understand what a yawning abyss the possible undoing of the "Holocaust" legend presents to fanatical partisans such as Dershowitz.

In the end, though, many of Dershowtiz's readers will be left with a nagging sense of something seriously awry, something which shines through the author's red welter of angry hyperbole. His notable professional and financial success at levels far above those of all but a few Americans, is frequently and boastfully paraded by the author, against the incongruous backdrop of dark-age specters of persecution and bigotry which menace Dershowitz and his people, even in America.

I keep thinking back to the highly insightful words of another Jewish writer, Howard F. Stein, writing in The Journal of Psychohistory (Fall, 1978) on "Judaism and the Group-Fantasy of Martyrdom." Following up on this peculiarly modern phenomenon, the victim-as-victor, for The Journal of Historical Review (Winter, 1980), Dr. Stein writes with clear insight in his article, "The Holocaust and the Myth of the Past as History":

For the Jews, the term"Holocaust" does not simply denote a single catastrophic era in history, but is a grim metaphor for the meaning of Jewish history. The word "Holocaust" lies at the heart of the Jewish experience of time itself. One is either anxiously awaiting persecution, experiencing persecution, recovering from it, or living in a period that is a temporary reprieve from it.

According to an oft-quoted old Yiddish phrase, It’s "tough to be a Jew" ("schwer zu sein a Jew"). But just possibly, for Mr. Dershowitz, a bit less chutzpah and a bit more psychological self-examination would make things easier for everyone.

Ed Toner

2003-03-02 12:32 | User Profile

Many years ago, I had a letter published in a Boston newspaper (Globe, I think) in which I lambasted Israel. In my closing, I signed it Edward J. Toner, LCDR USN (Ret.).

I got a call from Al Dershowitz, He was infuriated. He told me I was a liar, and not a LCDR at all. No officer would ever think like that, no less put into print what I had said, etc., etc..

I cited my commission as Ensign USNR upon graduation from USMMA, , (signed by Dwight Eisenhower) where I had studied law for 2 years. I mentioned that several of my classmates were lawers now, and gave him the names of a few that he could check with.

He was flabbegasted. He never called back.

il ragno

2003-03-02 14:52 | User Profile

GREAT anecdote, Ed!

Guess the Dersh jumped the gun there, and momentarily forgot that some of us don't pledge allegiance to two countries simultaneously.

Come to think of it, neither does he.

darkeddy

2003-03-02 16:31 | User Profile

So Derschowitz approves of ethnic relocation, not mass murder. This is a problem?

The more nastiness the Jews get up to, the less amunition they have against WN. So please, 'cleanse' the whole of Greater Israel. Manage the oil fields for us. Give more room for American Jews to immigrate on over. Learn that actually having a nation-state is a bit more difficult than wandering Jews might have imagined.